A standard-driven communication protocol for disconnected clinics in rural areas

The importance of the Electronic Health Record (EHR), which stores all healthcare-related data belonging to a patient, has been recognized in recent years by governments, institutions, and industry. Initiatives like Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) have been developed for the definition of standard methodologies for secure and interoperable EHR exchanges among clinics and hospitals. Using the requisites specified by these initiatives, many large-scale projects have been set up to enable healthcare professionals to handle patients' EHRs. Applications deployed in these settings are often considered safety-critical, thus ensuring such security properties as confidentiality, authentication, and authorization is crucial for their success. In this paper, we propose a communication protocol, based on the IHE specifications, for authenticating healthcare professionals and assuring patients' safety in settings where no network connection is available, such as in rural areas of some developing countries. We define a specific threat model, driven by the experience of use cases covered by international projects, and prove that an intruder cannot cause damages to the safety of patients and their data by performing any of the attacks falling within this threat model. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our protocol, we have fully implemented it

Pattern-driven security, privacy, dependability and interoperability management of iot environments

Achieving Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability (SPDI) is of paramount importance for the ubiquitous deployment and impact maximization of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Nevertheless, said requirements are not only difficult to achieve at system initialization, but also hard to prove and maintain at run-time. This paper highlights an approach to tackling the above challenges, through the definition of pattern language and a framework that can guarantee SPDI in IoT orchestrations. By integrating pattern reasoning engines at the various layers of the IoT infrastructure, and a machine-processable representation of said pattern through Drools rules, the proposed framework can provide ways to fulfill SPDI requirements at design time, and also provide the means to guarantee those SPDI properties and manage the orchestrations accordingly. Moreover, an application example of the framework is presented in an Industrial IoT monitoring environment

Towards a Security, Privacy, Dependability, Interoperability Framework for the Internet of Things

A popular application of ambient intelligence systems constitutes of assisting living services on smart buildings. As intelligence is imported in embedded equipment, the system becomes able to provide smart services (e.g. control lights, airconditioning, provide energy management services etc.). IoT is the main enabler of such environments. However, the interconnection of these cyber-physical systems and the processing of personal data raise serious security and privacy issues. In this paper we present a framework that can guarantee Security, Privacy, Dependability and Interoperability (SPDI) in IoT. Taking advantage of the underlying IoT deployment, the proposed framework not only implements the requested smart functionality but also provide modelling and administration that can guarantee those SPDI properties. Moreover, we provide an application example of the framework in a smart building scenario

A UML-based static verification framework for security

Secure software engineering is a new research area that has been proposed to address security issues during the development of software systems. This new area of research advocates that security characteristics should be considered from the early stages of the software development life cycle and should not be added as another layer in the system on an ad-hoc basis after the system is built. In this paper, we describe a UML-based Static Verification Framework (USVF) to support the design and verification of secure software systems in early stages of the software development life-cycle taking into consideration security and general requirements of the software system. USVF performs static verification on UML models consisting of UML class and state machine diagrams extended by an action language. We present an operational semantics of UML models, define a property specification language designed to reason about temporal and general properties of UML state machines using the semantic domains of the former, and implement the model checking process by translating models and properties into Promela, the input language of the SPIN model checker. We show that the methodology can be applied to the verification of security properties by representing the main aspects of security, namely availability, integrity and confidentiality, in the USVF property specification language

Formally based semi-automatic implementation of an open security protocol

International audienceThis paper presents an experiment in which an implementation of the client side of the SSH Transport Layer Protocol (SSH-TLP) was semi-automatically derived according to a model-driven development paradigm that leverages formal methods in order to obtain high correctness assurance. The approach used in the experiment starts with the formalization of the protocol at an abstract level. This model is then formally proved to fulfill the desired secrecy and authentication properties by using the ProVerif prover. Finally, a sound Java implementation is semi-automatically derived from the verified model using an enhanced version of the Spi2Java framework. The resulting implementation correctly interoperates with third party servers, and its execution time is comparable with that of other manually developed Java SSH-TLP client implementations. This case study demonstrates that the adopted model-driven approach is viable even for a real security protocol, despite the complexity of the models needed in order to achieve an interoperable implementation